Health Committee on Feb. 19th, 2007

[Rosemary Hignett]

Yes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

First of all, I want to thank you very much for being so clear in your presentation, as Ms. Brown alluded to at your very first questioning. You presented yourselves very well and you came out very clearly, and the answers we had will help us a long way in our report.

We don't have any more questions at this time, but we certainly will be looking forward to watching your progress as your country moves along on the signpost labelling, to see how effective it actually is with regard to reducing obesity in your country.

Thank you very much for being with us. We will sign off now. We're very pleased to have had you testify before us.

[Deirdre Hutton]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

I don't know if you have it on your agenda—I'm sure you don't. We have another individual, Richard Caborn, Minister of State, Minister for Sport, and the minister responsible for obesity from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the United Kingdom, who will be on a videoconference at 11:30. So we can break. This was actually just last minute, but it will be very interesting to hear from the minister in charge of this department.

We should talk about this now. Ms. Gagnon phoned me on Friday. She was a little concerned about our moving into a discussion on a report. I believe she has talked to you. She said she had. I'm very open to that. The idea was to try to bring up the opportunity for any of the new members who had just reviewed the report last week, to be able to talk about it and to put any questions they might have on it. It is open to having some questions on it, but I don't think we want to get into it too far, in fairness, because she can't be here and the NDP can't be here, either. I am open to having questions answered if you want to go that route, but if not, we can take it up at another time. What is your pleasure?

We will also have lunch brought in at noon.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Excellent.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

What is your pleasure? Do you want to get into the report a little bit?

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I had one question about the report. There were several examples of good things that are happening out there in different locations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

I will remind you right now we are not in camera.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

That's fine. I don't need to be in camera. I'm not going to use any examples, but I would ask the researchers, among the examples that are described, if there is one from a large urban centre. It seems to me I was reading about smaller cities and rural communities. If there isn't one from a large urban centre, we should have one, because I believe the nutritional problems, the obesity problems, etc., are just the same, particularly in the heart of inner cities, where often there are not the same kinds of grocery stores one finds, say, in the suburbs or in the outer ring of a city.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

We'll have Nancy answer that.

[Nancy Miller Chenier, Committee Researcher]

I can speak to that.

Several of them, especially the physical activity ones, do relate to urban centres, but one of the witnesses we had, Silken Laumann, had a really interesting example. I'd like to say that list is probably going to be added to, based on some of the panels that we've had even more recently. We'll definitely keep that in mind for both the physical activity side and the food side.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

There is some evidence, at least in the United States, that in the inner city, in the poorest neighbourhoods, the choice of foods is not as broad as in a suburban supermarket, but also that the prices are actually higher for the same items in the heart of downtown. It's pretty scary when you think a lot of the people are on social assistance and have less money for food. It seems to me that we have to look at the inner city as well as other settings.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Yes, that point is well taken.

Okay, perhaps there are other questions with regard to that, or we could spend a few minutes and talk generally if there are questions on the report, as long as we don't get into it too far.

[Steven Fletcher, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, MB]

Mr. Chair, Susan is not here, Christiane's not here, and the NDP are not here. It sort of defeats the purpose.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

It does to some degree, although we're just answering questions such as Bonnie had with regard to urban input. I think it was a good one.

Are there any others?

Colleen, this is all new to you. If you have any questions, generally, without disclosing what's in the report, I think that would be fair. If not, we will take up the report debate at another time.

We will break and then reconvene at 11:30.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

We'll call the meeting to order again.

We have with us Richard Caborn, the Minister for Sport and the minister responsible for obesity.

That's a difficult portfolio you have, Mr. Caborn.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

We certainly want to thank you for clearing your schedule and being able to present before the committee.

We're in our last few sessions before we issue a report on childhood obesity. We're very much looking forward to hearing your presentation. We talked to some of the people from the Food Standards Agency earlier.

We're very much looking forward to what you have to say with regard to what's happening in the United Kingdom on this file.

We'll hear from you, and then we'll ask you some questions. I want to thank you for making the time.

The floor is yours.

[Richard Caborn, Minister of State (Sport), Department for Culture, Media and Sport, House of Commons of the United Kingdom]

Thank you very much.

I'm a minister now, but I used to be the chairman of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry many years ago, so I have had the experience of being in your position.

Can I first of all thank you very much for inviting the Commons from the U.K., because this is clearly an issue that many countries around the world are actually sharing, and that's the difficulty of obesity and being overweight.

As far as England is concerned, half of our adults now are either overweight or obese, and on top of that, about one in four of our children are either overweight or obese. It is projected that if the current trends continue, something like 20% of our child population will be obese by the year 2010. That in reality is one million young people in the United Kingdom.

The overall cost of that obesity to the National Health Service—and you may well have the statistics—is estimated to be about £1 billion per year, and the cost to the economy is estimated to be between £2.3 billion and £2.6 billion a year. That is expected to rise given the trends that are with us at the moment; if they continue, that will have gone to £3.6 billion by the year 2010.

So we can see that both our countries, Canada and England, are facing real problems with obesity, and that's not just true in the developed world but also in the developing world. All the information with us to date is showing that nobody has actually managed to hold the rise; we all seem to be facing the same challenges

Whilst there is no single factor to which the rise in childhood obesity can be attributed, it is really about calories in, calories out. Indeed, that's what we're now trying to address in the United Kingdom. The factors also go far afield as architecture and town planning, given that the last towns planned in England—the “new towns”, as we call them—were designed around the motor car. We're now challenging some of our architects very much whether they will continue to design stairways out of buildings and escalators and lifts into them. Indeed, we now ought to move back to where we were before.

So we know very generally that we need to have this cultural shift, which we think is very important to get across the whole of the community. That's why departments right across government—the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills—are also involved in trying jointly to tackle the question of obesity, and that I only have part of the responsibility for obesity, as you rightly say.

We, as a government, have committed ourselves to halt the year-on-year increase in obesity among our children under 11 years of age, and we hope we can achieve that by the year 2010. That is a joint target, as I said, for the three departments: my own department, the DCMS, or Department of Culture, Media and Sport; along with the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills.

I think we are making some headway in this direction. You have been talking to the independent broadcast regulator in the U.K., Ofcom, and they've now published their new restrictions on the advertising and promotion of children's food and drink high in fat, salt, and sugar. This means there is a total ban now on adverts for foods with high fat, salt, and sugar on all children's programs, and indeed on all dedicated children's channels. We are now monitoring that closely to see what the impact of the Ofcom measures are across all the media and whether or not there's going to be a real change in the nature and balance of food promotion. When we've got that information, we'll decide what future action is necessary—and possibly that could lead into legislation as well.

Advertising is but one part of the approach to this. We are now consciously building back, as I said, the question of physical activity into our children's lives. There are two areas on which we've honed. First of all, there is unstructured play and physical activity in children's early years, and there we support the development of physical literacy skills for later in life. We also believe that part of that cultural shift, which is important, is about the health and participation benefits that come out of that unstructured play and physical activity.

In August of last year we published Time for Play: Encouraging greater play opportunities for children and young people. It set out what the government is doing in this area, as supported by an investment of about £155 million.

Those moneys came out of the big lottery fund here in the U.K. and are now been invested in the development of free and open access play provisions, targeting the areas of greatest need and deprivation, particularly around unemployment and social problems.

We have also made excellent progress in schools, and I think this has been one of our successes. In April 2001 we started school sport partnerships. Our target there was to give every child, from the age of five to 16, two hours of quality physical activity or sport every week. In 2001 about 20% to 25% of our school population was estimated to be getting two hours of quality physical activity or sport. Last year, in 2006, we had actually reached beyond the 75% target we had set ourselves. We got to 80%.

In figures, that means we've gone from 2 million young people in our schools to 5 million young people who are now receiving two hours of quality physical activity or sport. That's 6 million hours a week more that our young people are receiving in their schools.

This has been driven by our 450 school sport partnerships. One sports college, eight secondaries, and an average of forty primaries make up a school sport partnership, with the output of that two hours.

By 2010 we're hoping to have increased the two hours to four hours, so two hours in the curriculum and two hours beyond the school gates. Indeed, we're now moving and investing in that area through the club structures, through our governing bodies of club structures, and also with the investment into facilities that will be used beyond the schools.

We're also developing role models to go around to the schools. For instance, Kelly Holmes, our double gold medallist at the Athens Olympics, has now signed up as one of our sporting champions. I must admit that it has a tremendous effect within the school system when people like Kelly Holmes go into the schools and start talking to young people about the need to get quality physical education and sports as well.

So we are trying to tackle it on a number of layers. One is obviously on the question of diet. We have a number of initiatives with regard to five pieces of fruit per day and so on. We're also making sure that advertising does not encourage young people, children particularly, to take foods that are not healthy for them. We're doing that through Ofcom.

We've moved on to the unstructured physical activity and play for young people, particularly up to the age of five. In our school structure, through our 450 school sport partnerships, we are now changing a culture to one where young people are experiencing sports and physical activity to a minimum of two hours a week. That, we believe, has had quite a significant effect in the recent past.

So that is our approach to date, but we are looking to other countries as well—Canada, Scandinavia, Europe—to see whether other good examples and projects are being undertaken and whether we can share those experiences to make sure we can collectively tackle what to us are major problems: overweight and obesity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you very much.

We certainly are in this together, not only our country and your country, but many countries around the world. We're killing our kids with kindness, it seems, and we have to do something about that. In our country it's amazing that we have such a large problem, but it's not recognized by very many parents. We certainly do know that we have to recognize the problem before we can fix it.

I thank you for your presentation.

Now we'll open the floor to questioning, starting with Ms. Brown.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you very much, Minister, for joining us.

You mentioned $155 million to be spent from lottery funds on, I think, the Ofcom part of your strategy. We heard about $260 million Canadian being used by the Food Standards Agency.

Do you have any figure for us on how much money this project is costing across government when you include education and skills, public health, transport, etc.? Has anybody added those figures up?

[Richard Caborn]

I don't think we've added the figures up like that. Could I just correct you and say that it's £155 million that we're investing on children's play initiatives? That's on the informal and unstructured.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Sorry. It's children's play.

[Richard Caborn]

That's what we call children's play, or the unstructured part of that. That's £155 million that we're investing directly from central government into that. We're investing in excess of £1 billion on school sports development and facilities, and that's from a national level.

It's very difficult to give you a figure because local authorities also have a major investment in this area as well. If we were to put it in a ballpark figure, I would think that in terms of the unstructured children's play and the investment we've put into our schools, it would be around about £1.5 billion.

I'm just looking at my notes on the schools, and we're putting £1.5 billion into transforming school sports. That's in the five years leading up to 2008. On top of that, if you look at the investment we're putting in through local authorities, it's around £1 billion a year.